Offering no explanation, the Iowa Republican Party this weekend finally declared Rick Santorum as the winner of the 2012 Iowa caucuses. The weekend announcement came several days after the party said incomplete results precluded it from doing just that.

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GOP State Chairman Matt Strawn and the party's State Central Committee issued a statement late Friday evening naming the former Pennsylvania Senatorn as the winner, "in order to clarify conflicting reports and to affirm the results" that were released on Thursday of last week.

Several days before, the Iowa GOP said Santorum was 34 votes ahead of Mitt Romney in the final certified results from the January 3rd caucuses. But because eight precints never turned in certified resutls, Strawn said in the statement Thursday that the party could not declare a winner. He congratulated both Santorum and Romney. On January 3rd, Strawn had announced the Romney won the caucuses by eight votes.

This weekend's statement offered no explanation of what had changed since Thursday, and Strawn did not return phone calls.

Two GOP state central committee members told the Associated Press that the group held a conference call Friday night to discuss the "confusion" about the results of the caucuses and directed Strawn to issue a statement making it clear that the party considered Santorum the winner.

"There had been too much confusion and we needed to clear things up once and for all," said Steve Scheffler of the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition, a committee member who was on the call.

Another central committee member, Drew Ivers of Webster City, said the new statement declaring Santorum the winner was issued to "try to clarify the validity of the Iowa process."

Scheffler said there was no vote by the 17-member committee but it was clear from the call that the consensus was to issue the statement.